fucking 'product recovery CD' hell

[Throbbing Angel]

oi oi

in my should I reinstall win XP thread it was generally considered the way to go was to use the recovery DVD that came with it at purchase to return the laptop to its original state/status and hopefully start with a clean slate and see system improvements

WELL, I have just backed up all docs/pics etc to an external HD and then inserted the recovery DVD, followed the initial instructions which was
-to insert the dvd
-restart and hold down the C key
-follow the prompt

the prompt essentially asks do you want to recover the whole HDD, do a select procedure for advanced bods, or, quit

I chose the first option and set it going. I was presented with a basic grey screen and a progress bar which reached 5% then I went to make a brew, came back to a black screen, the sound of the DVD spinning - so I wait 10 minutes, sometimes the screen does go blank during some procedures, then it just switches itself off.

SO - questions

what next??
power it up and quickly whip out the recovery DVD and see if it boots?
power it up with the DVD in place-see what happens?
power it up with DVD in place whilst holding 'C' down and start again?

fer fucks sake


cheers muchly

 

[Throbbing Angel]

hmmm have tried google but am not finding much of use and my fingers are itching to switch it back on

 

[Sunray]

try again.

 

[Throbbing Angel]

do you mean try google again Sunray?

 

[Throbbing Angel]

right
I think it is sorted now

 

[Throbbing Angel]

yes
it is sorted
tried again with the DVD in place and it did the same thing - got to about 25% progress screen goes black DVD keeps spinning, and spinning, and spinning, leave it 15 minutes - get bored - eject DVD and fuck me - up pops a screen saying you're good to go - just give it CTRL ALT DEL

back to like the day it was bought and much fucking faster as a result

 

[Sunray]

One of the things that makes PC's slow down is disk fragmentation. I schedule a defrag daily, have the swap and internet history and cache off on another partition to prevent fragmentation.

 

[lunatrick]

One of the things that makes PC's slow down is disk fragmentation. I schedule a defrag daily, have the swap and internet history and cache off on another partition to prevent fragmentation.

how do you set up the swap file to be on a different drive? I thought I had done this - so my c drives swap is d and my f drive swap is g - but now I'm lookig at the settings and c and f are using themselves and I don't seem to have the option to change it to another drive only to change the size?

 

[Throbbing Angel]

yeah, I'd be interested to know too

I'm assuming you partition off a portion of your HD and point SWAP and CACHE at it yes?

what %age of the drive would people recommend using?

 

[lunatrick]

normally use around double of your ram so if you have 512 ram use 1024 for page file and so on...and yes you just partition of a portion of a drive for it when you install windows....

 

[Loki]

This website is useful for getting the max performance out of your PC

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

 

[Sigmund Fraud]

how do you set up the swap file to be on a different drive?

Has to be a different physical drive, not merely a different partition. And as this is a laptop it can't be an external drive neither.

 

[lunatrick]

ok - so how come I can't use say 'g' drive (which is physical separate drive ) for ram drive of c?

 

[Sigmund Fraud]

theres no problem on a desktop (or laptop with two HDs) - My Computer>properties>advanced>performance settings>advanced>virtual memory (in XP)- set the drive (or partition, but you only get a real benefit on a different drive to the system partition) and allocate initial and maximum sizes to 1.5 x RAM. Bear in mind that if you ever get a sluggish pagefile remember that it never gets defragged, so reduce size to minimum, reboot then run the defrag, then return to normal size.